By Eleanor Clift

The day of reckoning for Hillary Clinton is almost here. The voters in Ohio will either deal a final blow to her campaign or provide a much needed victory that at best will give her a reprieve in the long march to the nomination. A visitor from another country recently paid a call on the Clinton campaign headquarters in Ballston, Va., a place just over the bridge from Washington but light years away. He imagined he would be present at a moment of great triumph. Instead he found a campaign on the verge of imploding. Phone bank tables were unmanned. Bins full of mail sent over from the Senate sat unattended. A lot of young women, fanatical Hillary fans all, rushed about, seemingly unclear about what they were supposed to be doing. Other aides sat in front of computer screens, gloomily reading coverage of the campaign. Howard Wolfson and Phil Singer, the campaign’s communications team, weren’t speaking with anybody else, just doing their own thing, whatever that might have been. In short, it was not a happy family.

No amount of spin can overcome Hillary’s disappointing performance Tuesday night in Cleveland. MSNBC called it a draw, but hardly anybody else did. Hillary didn’t land a single blow. Her insistence on sticking with health-care reform as an issue for the first 16 minutes of the debate only reminded people how unbending she can be when convinced of the rectitude of her position. The debate was perhaps her last chance to turn the tide after 11 straight losses. As aides sat looking at polls coming in with the gaps widening, a new reality took hold. They’ve given up winning in Texas and they fear they may not win in Ohio.

Clinton once led Obama in all the national polls; now she’s behind him by a growing margin—as much as 13 or 18 percent in some soundings. In Texas, which votes on March 4, Obama is now ahead in most polls. For the first time he has also surged ahead of her in an Ohio poll—one taken before the debate. Hillary leads in three other polls, but by a margin of 4 percent at best. This is a state where she has the backing of the governor and once led by a double-digit margin. Campaign aides are dejected and demoralized, and they’re turning up for work late. It’s as if they’ve given up. Talk of a dream ticket—the idea that a deal would be struck to combine his youth and her experience—was once an exciting prospect. Now the likelihood of that happening seems to fade by the day.

There was pandemonium this week when an image of Barack Obama in African garb appeared on the Drudge Report, sourced to the Clinton campaign. A day of witch hunts apparently yielded nothing, and Obama took Hillary’s word that as far as she knew her campaign was not behind it. Donning unusual cultural costumes is a diplomatic gesture, not a career-ender (like when Michael Dukakis wore a helmet and rode around in a tank to prove his national-security bona fides). The furor died down pretty quickly—for now—but it was one more element in a budding storyline, nurtured by conservatives, that is calculated to paint Obama as somehow "other," not a red-blooded American, not one of us.

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By Jake Tapper 

"Barack Obama, Which of These People Don’t Deserve Health Care?" asks a new campaign mailer in Wisconsin for Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-NY, with a picture of seven voters — a diverse group, as if Benetton also made clothes for retirees.

You can read the mailer HERE.

"Barack Obama’s Health Care Plan Leaves 15 Million Americans Without Coverage," says the second page. Then, ominously: "Will It Be You?"

The mailer says "Obama’s Plan Says ‘No We Can’t'" … and also accuses the plan of "wast(ing) billions, costing taxpayers $1700 more per newly covered person," accuses Obama of having "launched ‘Harry and Louise’ type attacks on Hillary’s plan … using Republican and insurance company talking points…"

And also, comes the obligatory critical quote from New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, a strong critic of Obama, who accused Obama in one column of "unscrupulous demagoguery." Another side of the mailer provides more of the Krugman quote.

We will provide a more thorough fact check of the mailer in a bit …

On first blush, the main charge seems misleading, since what leaves people uninsured under Obama’s plan is the lack of a mandate requiring them to sign up for health insurance with the threat of a penalty. So it’s the people themselves who will decided if they’re left out — not Obama.

But more later…

Source:  ABC News

Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy accused Hillary Clinton today of “fear mongering” and spreading distortions about Barack Obama’s health-care plan in a pamphlet her campaign sent to voters in Wisconsin.

Kennedy, who campaigned for Obama in Ohio this weekend, rebuked Clinton for saying in campaign documents that Obama’s plan to overhaul the health-care system would leave 15 million Americans without coverage. Kennedy, who has fought for universal health care, said the claim is false.

“I was really shocked and surprised that Senator Clinton would put that pamphlet out,” the Massachusetts Democrat said on a call with reporters. “It’s basically fear mongering.”

Tensions between the two Democratic candidates are rising ahead of key nominating contests, including the Wisconsin primary on Feb. 19 and the Ohio and Texas primaries in March. Obama has a small lead in the count for pledged delegates so far.

Both Clinton and Obama are proposing a restructuring of the U.S. health-care system. The main difference is that Clinton, a New York senator, plans to mandates health-care coverage while Illinois Senator Obama doesn’t propose a mandate.

Obama says that doesn’t mean his plan would leave anyone without coverage.

“Let me be perfectly clear, if you’re an uninsured American who wants health-care coverage, you will have it under my plan,” Obama said in a speech to Wisconsin Democrats in Milwaukee yesterday. “Any suggestion otherwise is just false.”

Kennedy said he wouldn’t have endorsed the Illinois senator if he weren’t convinced that he would succeed in establishing universal health care.

Clinton Response

“We have enormous respect for Senator Kennedy, but the fact on this is clear and Obama’s plan leaves 15 million people out,” Howard Wolfson, a spokesman for Clinton, said in an interview today.

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Suppose I tell you that the government will design a product and make you buy it. If you say no thanks, that’s too bad. The government will decide what you need and what you will buy.

If you say you can’t afford it, we’ll send in government investigators to check, and if they conclude indeed you can’t afford it, we’ll tax your neighbors and make them subsidize you so you can pay for it.

We’ll set up a government bureaucracy to monitor and make sure you’re cooperating. If they discover you haven’t made the purchase, they’ll go to your employer and have your wages garnisheed.

Let’s assume further that total spending for this government-designed and -mandated product accounts for about a fifth of the nation’s total economy.

The former Soviet Union? Communist China?

No, this is the new Hillarycare. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., having once failed to explicitly nationalize the one-fifth of our economy going to health care, now wants to slip it past us by dressing it up in drag.

Her plan is to use a federal government mandate to force every American to buy health insurance. She claims it won’t violate our freedom because if you already have a private plan that’s OK. But a government alternative plan will be made available.

The government will regulate health care, define acceptable health insurance and force every American to buy a plan based on the government-established standard.

Her opponent for the Democratic presidential nomination, Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, also wants vast government regulations and controls to define and price out health care. But Obama, who has the most liberal voting record in the U.S. Senate, grasps that, short of invoking a police state, it still must be up to consumers to decide to purchase health insurance.

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Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama agree on most policy issues, but that makes their rare differences all the more revealing. To wit, their running scrap over Mrs. Clinton’s "individual mandate" for health care, which Mr. Obama has now had the nerve to expose for its inevitable government coercion.

Mrs. Clinton’s proposal requires everyone to buy health insurance, along with more insurance regulation, a government insurance option for everyone and tax hikes. Mr. Obama likes all that but his mandate would only apply to children. He argues that the reason many people aren’t insured is because it’s too expensive, not because they don’t want it. Mrs. Clinton counters that coverage can’t be "universal" without a mandate.

But then Mr. Obama had the impudence to defend his views. His campaign distributed a mailer in key primary states that claimed the Clinton plan "forces everyone to buy insurance, even if you can’t afford it." It also featured an image of an anxious couple at a kitchen table. The Clinton apparat went apoplectic, claiming the flyer evokes the famous "Harry and Louise" commercials. A common article of liberal faith is that this "smear campaign" doomed HillaryCare in 1994 — as opposed to, say, its huge cost and complexities. But never mind.

Yet if Mrs. Clinton’s plan is better because it has a mandate, how does it work in the real world, where some people still won’t be able to afford insurance, or would decline to acquire it? At a recent debate, the Illinois Senator drove the point home, asking Mrs. Clinton, "You can mandate it but there will still be people who can’t afford it. And if they can’t afford it, what are you going to fine them? Are you going to garnish their wages?" And in an interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos on Sunday, Mrs. Clinton conceded that "we will have an enforcement mechanism" that might include "you know, going after people’s wages."

Well, well. In other words, HillaryCare II isn’t all about "choice," but would require financial penalties for people to pay attention, including garnishing wages. To put it more accurately, the individual mandate is really a government mandate that requires brute force plus huge subsidies to get anywhere near its goal of universal coverage.

Mitt Romney’s mandate program in Massachusetts is already expected to reach $1.35 billion in annual costs by 2011, up from $158 million today. And that’s with only half of the previously uninsured currently enrolled; no less than 20% didn’t qualify for subsidies and were granted exemptions because the costs were too much of a hardship.

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PITY THE Rockefellers. Try though they might, they never manage to get a Rockefeller elected president. Governors, senators and even a vice president have borne the Rockefeller name. Yet the presidency eludes them. And so they busy themselves playing kingmaker behind the scenes. Their latest project is Hillary Clinton.

Last Thursday, the public interest group Judicial Watch published a memorandum which the Clinton Library was forced to release under the Freedom of Information Act.

The 24-page memo shines a spotlight on Hillary’s little-known relationship with America’s mightiest oil and banking dynasty. Dated May 26, 1993 and addressed to “Hillary Rodham Clinton”, the memo comes from Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia — better known as Jay Rockefeller — whose great-grandfather founded Standard Oil.

The memo lays out a detailed strategy for pushing the “Clinton reform plan” for universal health coverage. In it, Rockefeller snaps orders at Mrs. Clinton in the imperious tones of a man accustomed to obedience.

He instructs Hillary to get tough on critics of the health plan. “Impeach the credibility of opponents”, he writes. Portray them as “perpetrators”, “paid lobbyists” and purveyors of “ideological extremism”. Assign investigators to conduct “opposition research” on them and expose their “lifestyles”. Do not allow them “even one day without scrutiny”.

Regarding the need for a radio and TV advertising campaign, Rockefeller fumes, “Fundraising must begin immediately. I am frankly surprised that I have not been contacted or shown a plan for fundraising and media expenditures.”

Rockefeller plainly viewed Hillary as his subordinate, and the “Clinton reform plan” as his project. And no wonder. The plan we know as Hillarycare was originally Rockefeller’s idea.

“Health care was his major interest”, writes Joshua Green in The Atlantic. “The agony of watching his mother’s lengthy battle with Alzheimer’s had made him a crusader for universal health insurance, and in the years before Bill Clinton was elected he had organized labor and health interests toward that goal.”

Many Democrats urged Jay Rockefeller to run for president in 1992, but he declined and backed the Clintons instead.

Read more at POE.com

Sorry folks been tied up! Bunch ‘o links to chew on!

A Clue to How Hillary Clinton Found Her Voice - She hired a voice and drama coach!

Republicans for Hillary

Anti-Clinton film backers take on campaign-funding law

Mr. Clinton and the Tycoon

Another Clinton gets emotional - Now Chelsea is in on the act!

The Cooper Concerns “We’ll crush you. You’ll wish you never mentioned this to me.” - Must read!

Hillary’s Delegate Condition

The Baggage Hillary Bears

It’s Splitsville for Rupert and Hillary

Bill and Hillary Billions

Questioner calls Bush ‘the bastard,’ Hillary Clinton smiles

Fewer Want Bill Clinton Back in the White House

Hillary Rodham Clinton: A Pillar Of Female Achievement? Really??

Bill Clinton’s Kazakh connection

The Fix was in for Hillary

In Health Debate, Clinton Remains Vague on Penalties

Is Hillary losing support from women?

Hillary’s Plantation Politics

Clinton Gets Most Lobbyist Money

Can the Clintons change?

Boo Hoo Hillary pulls crying stunt again!

Clinton’s ‘35 years of change’ omits most of her career

Hillary Clinton may unite Republicans

Bill Clinton Campaigns… Against Ted Kennedy

Clinton suggests tapping wages

There Will Be Blood

Fox Poll: Hillary Will Do Anything

Superdelegates To Clinton’s Rescue?

Bill Clinton: Rogue Co-President in Waiting

Nazi reference by Clinton supporter repudiated by her campaign

Clinton’s Filthy Lucre: Is it just us, or is there something off about ex-president Bill Clinton using his influence overseas to enrich a pal and then accepting the pal’s big donation to his foundation? This looks like a bribery racket.

Hillary’s Faustian bargain

Internal Memos Detail Creation of Government “Interest Group Database” to Collect Personal Data on Health Care Debate Activists

(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch, the public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption, today released records obtained from the Clinton Presidential Library related to the National Taskforce on Health Care Reform, a “cabinet-level” task force chaired by former First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton during the Clinton administration.  Specifically, these documents come from the White House Health Care Interdepartmental Working Group. 

Among the highlights of the documents released by Judicial Watch: 

• A June 18, 1993 internal Memorandum entitled, “A Critique of Our Plan,” authored by someone with the initials “P.S.,” makes the startling admission that critics of Hillary’s health care reform plan were correct:  “I can think of parallels in wartime, but I have trouble coming up with a precedent in our peacetime history for such broad and centralized control over a sector of the economy…Is the public really ready for this?… none of us knows whether we can make it work well or at all…”

• A “Confidential” May 26, 1993 Memorandum from Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) to Hillary Clinton entitled, “Health Care Reform Communications,” which criticizes the Task Force as a “secret cabal of Washington policy ‘wonks’” that has engaged in “choking off information” from the public regarding health care reform.  The memorandum suggests that Hillary Clinton “use classic opposition research” to attack those who were excluded by the Clinton Administration from Task Force deliberations and to “expose lifestyles, tactics and motives of lobbyists” in order to deflect criticism.  Senator Rockefeller also suggested news organizations “are anxious and willing to receive guidance [from the Clinton Administration] on how to time and shape their [news] coverage.”

• A February 5, 1993 Draft Memorandum from Alexis Herman and Mike Lux detailing the Office of Public Liaison’s plan for the health care reform campaign.  The memorandum notes the development of an “interest group data base” detailing whether or not organizations “support(ed) us in the election.”  The database would also track personal information about interest group leaders, such as their home phone numbers, addresses, “biographies, analysis of credibility in the media, and known relationships with Congresspeople.”

These records released by Judicial Watch were obtained from the approximately 13,000 records made publicly available by the Clinton Library.  The National Archives admits there may be an additional 3,022,030 textual records, 2,884 pages of electronic records, 1,021 photographs, 3 videotapes and 3 audiotapes related to the Task Force that are being withheld indefinitely from the public.  On November 2, 2007 Judicial Watch filed a lawsuit with the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia against the National Archives to force the release of all the Task Force records.

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SEN. Hillary Clinton faces tonight’s Iowa caucuses not as the inevitable Demo cratic presidential nominee but seriously challenged by Sen. Barack Obama, thanks in no small part to committing a strategic error: premature triangulation. The problem is reflected by what happened to a proposal for a simplified, though sweeping, health-care plan.

One longtime Democratic consultant, not involved in any campaign this time, suggested that Clinton propose a genuine universal health-care scheme. Everybody would be covered by Medicare, except people who chose to retain their private health-insurance plans. The consultant gave the idea to somebody close to the senator, but the intermediary refused to pass it on to the candidate. He said it never would get beyond Mark Penn and his strategy of triangulation.

Penn, a professional pollster who was political adviser to President Bill Clinton, is chief strategist for the Hillary Clinton campaign. He has embraced the triangulation - coming over as a third force somewhere between liberal and conservative poles - that characterized Bill Clinton’s politics after 1994, based on advice from Dick Morris. To many Democratic operatives, Penn’s triangulation prematurely introduced a general election strategy, when in fact the party nomination was still in doubt.

Health care is particularly sensitive for Sen. Clinton. Her failed 1993-94 plan is blamed inside Democratic ranks for the Republican takeover in the ‘94 elections and for freezing the entire health issue for a decade. While her current call for mandatory health-care coverage might seem radical, it is criticized on the left as embracing "shared responsibility" with private health-insurance firms (similar to plans by Republican Govs. Mitt Romney in Massachusetts and Arnold Schwarzenegger in California). That looks like triangulation.

It was even more obviously triangulation in September, when Clinton voted for a resolution declaring that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard is a terrorist organization. The other three Democratic senators seeking the presidential nomination - Obama, Joseph Biden and Christopher Dodd - all opposed the resolution on grounds it would give President Bush a pretext for invading Iran (though Obama was not present for the vote). Clinton, while attacking Bush’s Iraq policy, did not want to seem soft on Iran’s Holocaust-denying president vowing the destruction of Israel.

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